Grapfruit Juice.

Not much to say here but I thought I'd share. Mum has a GIANT grapefruit tree in the backyard and she really likes grapefruit juice. So every time a big wind blows through I pick up all the grapefruit (usually about 3 buckets at a time) and get to juicing.

We have tried many different juicers over the years but the best ones have been simple electric rotaries (like a traditional lemon juicer but with electricity).

Here is the haul from two afternoons juicing.

It's thick, pulpy, sticky and yum!

Apple Mint Jelly

As I sit down to write this entry I realise that the recipe is at the other end of country, so no measurements sorry but some pretty pictures.

These are the apples you should use, Granny Smiths (aka green apples). They have the highest pectin in the peel so gel the best and often negate the need for additional gelatine.

Ideally you want to use a lot of small apples to maximise the peel to flesh ratio.

My mint plant looking a little bit worse for wear after being raided for the mint jelly.

Roughly chopped apples (pips and all), mint, lemon rind + juice, water. If you over-boil at this stage you will get very little liquid later on, so my advice is to be generous with the water now - you should still be able to get it to gel.

Boiled down a bit to get all the goodness out of the peel.

This was a previous batch which was overboiled - but you can still add extra water later on, it's just better not to (I believe).

The setup: hot, damp cheesecloth in a sieve resting over a tall bowl (need plenty of room for the liquid to fall - liquid level should never reach the bottom of the sieve.

Heaps of apple mush beginning to fall through. Leave for several hours (overnight in the mcrowave to keep away the nasties).

Awww yeah look at all that goodness. Actually this won't make very much at all. Next time I would add a cup or two of water to this. It will still be thick-ish but will maximise output (esp as I don't think mint jelly has to be rock-hard jelly).

Now we boil it up (gently) with 2/3C of sugar added for every cup of liquid. Her you can see the bowl with the foam skimmed off of the top.

Colour change due to food colouring. You can see how much liquid has been lost.

Jars are fresh out of the dishwasher and in the oven on low to dry completely and stay hot.

Dark green jar from a previous batch (that I boiled too much so only ended up with one jar worth of liquid). Lighter green jars have just been filled and are upside down to help the lids reseal (button pops back down).

Still only got 3 jars out of this batch (began with 4 medium apples), jelly is still thick so will water down more at the beginning next time.


DISCLAIMER: I often reuse food jars and have never had a problem with sealing or sterilisation - some people however will tell you that it is a bad idea to use these lids. Do your own research and make up your own mind.

Time for dishes.

KITTY!

My Vege Patch

Hey Internet.

So being unemployed seems to agree with me (I have a job I just get a 10 week break between the interview and actually starting) so I've been doing all sorts of exciting things.... (ok you caught me - I watched the entire US Office in 1 week). But occassionally I do go outside and here is what I've been doing out there.

 

 These two boxes are planted with strawbs, toms, lettuce seedlings, and a zucchini plant. You can probably see all the weeds - that's what the black roll of weed mat is for - I covered them all up. Out of sight, out of mind.

There are another 2 boxes (made from adapted apple picking bins - stuffed with straw then soil) just to the right of these and that is where I'm growing my veges from seeds.

I bought a wide variety of strawberry plants - and I have def noticed that the bigger ones are producin larger quantities and just larger fruit. No tomatoes yet and the lettuces took a long time but they're finally startign to take off.

From my seedling garden - IT'S A tiny LETTUCE (and a few weeds)

Cutting the first strawberry. Going to have to work on the netting design, I've already lost a couple of strawbs to birdies. Good thing is my Dad's coffee addiction keeps me well supplied with grounds to keep the slimeys away.

Best thing about this garden is how high it is. No back-breaking work here (although I do occassionally stab myself with the nails that hold the netting in place.


P.S. Expect to see more updates as things start growing!

Goodreads link

I am a nerdfighter.

If you don't know what this is, google it - you won't be disappointed.

Nerdfightaria are currently hosting a global bookswap, and I have a sneaking suspicion that instead of linking to my goodreads page, I instead linked to this blog.

So on the off chance that my book dealer (of only slightly more legitamacy than a drug dealer) comes here I wanted to send them to the right place.

https://www.goodreads.com/CraftyOldMaid

And also to say that you don't have to send me a romance if you don't want, just a book that you love that isn't horrifically tragic. (I have vague recollections of being overly and exceedingly detailed in my demands).

I'll post again soon with the book that I'm sending, and the book that arrives for me :)

Becky DFTBA

X-Stitch Bookmarks

I have made these as gifts for friends for the past few years, and they have been VERY well received J I actually forgot to take photos before I gave them away, but my friends were kind enough to take some action shots for me.

The patterns are sort of my own design. I’ve seen pictures of other cross-stitches with similar patterns, and from these pictures I adapted my own designs. It’s always fun drawing up patterns on graph paper – in fact it’s one of the few occasions when I get to rock out my coloured pencils these days.

The Doctor is legen…waitforit…dary. Unsurprisingly, lots of my friends share this viewpoint. Great minds think alike and all that. I have made several Doctor Who bookmarks, including one which I don’t have a photo of, but basically it’s ‘I heart heart DW’, where the DW is the official symbol that’s shaped like the Tardis.

Here are a couple of examples of the Sonic Screwdriver. Matt Smith’s green screwdriver was a pattern that I created from scratch myself. I am quite pleased with it tbh and rather proud.

This lion is a cut-down pattern from a larger picture of the Game of Thrones Houses. The Lannister Lion, although the person I gave it too didn’t really get it. Luckily she is equally into Harry Potter and it works brilliantly as a Gryffindor lion as well, so win/win.

I love making these bookmarks, they're great gifts, quick to do, making the patterns is enormous fun, and it's great to use up old DMC threads rather than having to buy specific colours (I have a large supply of Tardis blue)

A Stolen Idea...

Today, for a change (insert sarcasm), I found myself in a bookstore. Among the myriad shelves of wonderment, I was there to purchase...um...let's call it "L Variations on Black and White", since I had owned it in ebook form since it was published, but I had always wanted a real copy, and since the movie is coming out shortly and I wanted to buy the original cover before they ruined it with actors on the front.

So there I am, pretending to browse a Chocolate Cooking book while waiting for the other lady in the aisle to leave so I could grab by book and purchase it hurriedly without making eyecontact with the cashier.

Side note: I am not ashamed of reading romances, I will proudly shout it from the rooftops that I am a sucker for a happy ending. But there are limits. I am not ashamed of buying, reading or liking this book, but neither am I ready to shout it from the rooftops. Maybe next year.

The lady in the aisle pulls out her phone. 'Great' I think, 'I'm stuck here while she one finger texts a 200 character message so it's not a waste'. This lady did remind me of my Mum a bit. But she's not texting. She's comparing a book to a list on her phone.

At this point I walked away, because you know, despite all evidence to the contrary, I am not a creeper. But get this...how clever is she? She's got a list of her bookshelf in her phone so she always knows what to buy. A clever idea, but is it really necessary?

Wait. What's this? Out of the corner of my eye I spot one of my favourite things in the world. A book - by one of my favourite authors- ON SALE! It's a Susan Elizabeth Phillips. I've definitely read it before but do I own it? Suddenly the cell-phone list seems like an extremely good idea.

Ultimitely to bring this long walk for a short drink of  water to it's end. I'm making a list of all my books.

Side note, I'm actually a qualified cataloguing librarian. I should really be ashamed of myself for not having done this sooner.
So here is my bookshelf.

My YA bookshelf, note that the Doctor is always watch the Weeping Angel

My romance bookshelf, double layered,
the shelf with the banana is entirely Johanna Lindsey,
and the bottom is big books.

This is going to be a big project, rife with distractions, but it will be really fun as well.

Beaded Christmas Tree

This project began Nov 2013 during a Librarian Trilogy* marathon with a fellow librarian, and was finished (after an 8 month hiatus) yesterday.

*Awesome films, well worth watching, Indiana Jones-esque.

We watched movies, we ate food that was terrible for us, and we thread tiny beads onto wire.

My first beading attempt - a bag-tag flower thing :)

I had done some beading before, but certainly nothing this ambitious, and it was very much a learning curve. We started out with the smaller top branches, threading the beads between our fingers, counting as we went and pre-cutting lengths of wire. Every step in the previous sentence is inefficient and can be improved.

-Don’t pre-cut the wire, just work straight off the reel.
-There’s no need to count as you go. Just load heaps of beads onto the wire and cut it when a branch is complete.
-Many techniques exist for threading beads; for these tiny beads, I personally recommend the ’stab repeatedly’ method:

v  Have a big pile of tiny beads in the bottom of a small bag

v  Fold back the lip of the bag to back a firm opening

v  Hold your stiff wire ≈6cm from the end

v  Gently fold up the last ≈1cm of wire ≈10° (to help stop beads rolling off)

v  Pass the wire horizontally through the beads

v  Lift the wire out, tilting upward slightly

v  These actions creating a digging motion

v  Repeat 5 or 6 times, and then push the threaded beads down the wire past your hand

v  I’m not sure I can be more descriptive than that, short of posting a video (which I lack both the equipment and technical expertise for).

v  In other words: Stab the wire into the beads and hope some of them are threaded on :P (much faster than hand-threading)

Kit from Coastal Treasures, Beachport SA

So ultimately while the top, smaller branches took ages, by the time I was 1/3 of the way through, I was working like 10x faster and the rest of it just came together.

The original pattern doesn’t have the bottom two rows of branches; I added these since I had leftover beads and wire. Although 17 loops on a branch is definitely the maximum, otherwise it becomes too heavy to support itself.

So then I added the decorations, made the star for the top, BROKE the star for the top, shoddily repaired the star for the top and finally attached the star, to the top.

14 beads for a loop, 7 for the gap, so HUNDREDS for a big branch

Close-up of branches

Oh and these beautiful flowers – a gift from a neighbour’s garden, just for doing a couple of easy but nice things for her. Karma rules!

Christmas in July

The great thing about this time of year is that there's is a lot a Christmas stuff on sale; in preparation for the incoming new stock in a couple of months. Ok so maybe there's not a LOT of stuff around, but I have come across at least a few things I'm keen to try out. Plus here in NZ (I'm back in NZ for 6 months) it's winter which is the stereotypical time to make Xmas crafts since crafting is driven by the North.

While the Commonwealth Games have been on (GO THE KIWIS!!!) I have had a lot of time to watch replays (I'm most definitely not keen enough to watch it live at 2am) and do some crafting Christmas Crafting :

Woven Snowflake Ornament
www.pennymarblequilts.com

Here are my snowflakes. The original pattern called for 12- 6x0.5" strips with cardboard in the middle of the fabrics (stuck together with fusible webbing). These are the two largest snowflakes in the picture and...well...they're OK I guess, but the fabrics are already beginning to fray and they're a bit too big in my opinion (though prehaps the perfect size for a kids project?). The large red and white was my first attempt and I learned something very important that wasn't highlighted in the instructions - Folding Direction Matters! You can go all under/under, all over/over, (the same and my recommended option as the completed snowflake sits better), all under/over is also fine, but when you start to mix them up and just do whatever, you can end up with some rather odd feedthroughs as you can see in my first attempt.

So after I had it all sussed, the first thing I did was take out the cardboard filling in the fabric sandwich - you still need some stiffness so I recommend 2-3 sheets of fusible webbing - I also reduced the sizes of the strips (proportionally) and am really happy with the results.These will make great Xmas Card fillers this year, all they need is a nice gold ribbon to hang them with.

What could it possibly be?

I don't want to give the game away about my beading project yet. Suffice it to say that it is a Xmas project, and you can probably extrapolate from there. This is a lot of fun and a great craft to do while watching tv. As you can see I've got myself set up with a dinner lap-tray with a convenient border to catch run-away beads. Rather than count as I go, I have found it much easier to thread on 30cm or so of beads and then close off the end and start twisting. Next purchase might have to be a proper bead mat though, since a piece of scrap quilting fabric really doesn't have enough friction to get the job done properly. Keep an eye on that material though, you might see it shortly in another project...

Crafting without craft supplies.

So I've been in Aussie land for the past 18 months or so, completing my post-graduate study and entering the world of real-proper-grown-up careers/jobs/"yaymoneyness'. Except not really yay money because, you know, student loans. Anyway my crafting has taken a dramatic hiatus over the past couple of years. I got so caught up with uni and for those of you who've done long-term study, you'll probably understand what I mean when I say that when you've got assignments to do, you can't really do leisure stuff becuase you know you should be studying. You can do nothing quite a lot of the time, but you can't do fun stuff. It's a weird situation and it's all psychological. Anyway I'm all done with that (for the meanwhile at least) so it's on to a new schedule where I work 8 hours a day and spend my evenings cooking dinner, watching Masterchef and (if my eyes aren't too tired) trying to do some crafts.

The thing is, I'm really a quilter, I enjoy other crafts, but I usually treat them as a welcome break from quilting. However here across the ditch (Tasman Sea) I don't have my material, gadgets or a sewing machine, I've basically been stuck with cross-stitch (it's too bloody hot to knit). Sometimes though cross-stitch is too fiddly, too count-y, too strain your eyes-y.

Since I'm starting to sound like an absolute whinge I think it's probably time to wrap this up. I've started a few new cross-stitches which I'm keen to share (I've even (unbelievably) finished one of them). I also went to a craft show and picked up a few new gadgets which I'm keen to share my thoughts on. So there should be some new posts coming soon.

My ambition for this week is to spend some time actually figuring out how this blog works so I can get photos etc in the way I want them and get the layout looking nice.

Be good everyone, have fun whatever you're doing and remember it's important to turn your head 45o to the right ocassionally and notice the non-internet world.

Kittens in Mugs Who Ate my Thread

After the dramas with my last cross-stitch, the Rose of Love, I found these cute kittens to be relatively easy. The stitching was all straight forward and the aida was very easy to work with, if a little stiff.

The one major whoopsadaisy I had with this pattern was an insufficient length of thread for one of the colours included with the kit. It was a cream colour and when I reached a point where I had 6 stitches to go and only 5cm of thread left I knew I was cutting things a bit fine. Somehow I managed to complete these 6 stitches by constantly rethreading the needle. It was labour-intensive, time consuming and a pain in the butt. But I got it done.

I went over the pattern again to see if I had wasted any large quantities of thread anywhere, but to my eye I hadn’t. I’m still confused as to how close it was; I guess I was functioning under the naïve assumption that kits would always supply me with a surplus of thread. My mistake. That should have been the end of the matter, except it wasn’t.

As I was nearing the end of the pattern I found that I had missed a single stitch in this cream colour that I had now run out of. I panicked. Now I realize that a clever person would at this point take a break, head into town and just buy some more of the colour. Unfortunately I’m either, depending upon your point of view, too lazy or too stubborn to do this. So I had to get creative. I unthreaded about 1.5cm of the same colour from the back of some stitching and began the unbelievably fiddly task of putting in this one stitch.

It would have been 500 times easier to just use a different colour and no-one would have been any the wiser, EXCEPT that I would have known. Sometimes these sorts of things don’t bother me at all and sometimes they eat away at my brain until I have fix them to the way they should be. As it happens, due to the excessive amount of handling this small piece of cotton was exposed to, it became off-coloured anyway. I’m surprised it didn’t burst into flames given the heated glares of hatred it was exposed to.

The element of this pattern that struck me the most was the incredible change that the back stitch made to the appearance of the pattern. These kittens turned from colourful blobs to detailed faces with expressions and appeal.

My one disappointment with the pattern (and it is very minor) is that the left mug which is supposed to be decorated with hearts just looks like it’s decorated with red triangles. In the example picture that came with the kit they are clearly hearts. Yet I followed the pattern exactly and ended up with triangles. Oh well, I guess if I had wanted to undo a LOT a stitches and waste a lot of thread and time I could have altered the pattern.

I figure once it’s finished, it’s finished. Onward and upward.

The Bloody Neverending Rose of Love

This beautiful Rose of Love cross-stitch is definitely a project that I completed in fits and starts. The pattern is from a book of “quick and easy” cross-stitch patterns for greeting cards loaned to me by a friend of mine. Can I just point out that “quick and easy” is most definitely a RELATIVE term.

I started stitching in the centre (as you do) and straight away encountered a bit of a challenge. When stitching the first colour of the rose (I began with the lightest pink) it was very difficult to keep an accurate count of where I was. The stitches follow a broken, uneven spiral sort of shape. As I had no other stitches in place yet and hadn’t put in guide-lines, I found myself constantly going one square too far, or not far enough. Toward the end of that first colour I felt as if I had undone every single stitch at least once in my efforts to be accurate to the pattern. It drove me bloody bonkers.

I would just like to point out that I’m not completely silly though. I am fully aware that there are several things I could have done differently which could have potentially made my life easier. So here are the answers to the questions I know you’re just dying to know:

Why didn’t you stitch in guide-lines?
Well. I have a degree in mathematics and I’m a bit OCD when it comes to numbers and symmetry. I knew that if I put in guidelines I would be constantly recounting and double-checking that they were in the right place. I know I wouldn’t be able to trust myself and all that second-guessing would not encourage a positive attitude to my work.

Why didn’t you just stitch all of the colours in one petal at a time?
The long and the short of it is that I hate starting and finishing threads. It irks me something wicked.

Why didn’t you just count more carefully in the first place?
I tried. I truly did. The stitches were very small. It was HARD.

Once the first colour was in I progressed to the next shade of pink and everything went swimmingly until the flower was complete. At this point I felt as if I had the majority of the project complete so I figured it wouldn’t matter if I took a small break. Nearly a month later I got around to stitching the leaves. A few weeks after that I got the border completed. All that was left now was the backstitch and the dreaded French knots. Sigh.

I attempted to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. I put in all of the backstitch around the rose and even did the vines around the border. In hindsight this was a rather silly idea as I ended up wasting a lot of thread having to put in the French knots separately. A friend gave me a link to a great blog article about how to create French knots and after many failed attempts I finally had a product I wasn’t completely disappointed with.

With that the Rose of Love was finished. I haven’t framed it yet. I’m on the lookout for a nice square frame that will fit and then I thought I might try my hand at some lacing.

Let's Get the Ball Rolling

Here it is. My first official finished cross-stitch. I started this design in Feb when I had a few week holiday from university because of the Christchurch earthquake. The pattern came from one of my mother's craft magazines. I fell in love with it at first sight and knew that it would make a fantastic gift for my uncle to hang in his bach. In the magazine they used a natural, unrefined cloth to create an old world look, however when I went to my local spotlight to get the materials they had nothing even remotely similar. So I purchased an off-white 18 count aida square and coffee/tea/soy sauce stained it overnight to create this taupe colour that I'm pretty happy with.

I learned so many things from doing this cross-stitch, it's not the first time I've ever attempted the craft but it is the first project I've completed. I learned the importance of planning your route so you don't work yourself into a corner. I learned from a lot of mistakes that I would dearly love to avoid in future, such as when working over two squares in your aida, make sure you count them off in twos. Always work from what you've done, don't try and connect pieces later as you WILL have miscounted something. Always make sure your hands are impeccably clean otherwise white cotton will not be your friend.

The only thing I would change about this lighthouse is the backstitching. I had no idea how to backstitch and my crafty friend helped me out, but in hindsight I feel like I should have used just a single thread instead of double. That being said I plan to have it framed in driftwood and give it away for christmas, so maybe before then I'll find the motivation to unpick all the back stitching and redo it. Or maybe not.

Kia Ora World

Kia Ora world.
The purpose of this blog is directly stolen from my good friend who runs a similar blog recording all of her craft projects. I'm also hoping it will inspire me to finish all of my UFOs so that I actually have something to blog about.
My skills at the moments and fair to middling in quilting, cross-stitch and knitting. I'm very keen to try some long-stitch as well soon but I haven't been able to find many nice kits for sale in NZ, and I don't want to import unless I do a big lot, and as a student that costs money I just don't have.
Hmmm perhaps I should steal some more ideas from my mate and try some recycled fabric projects...stay tuned for photos and to see what I'm up to.
Becs